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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the light from the squad cars and flashlights, what does the narrator see on the beach as the other couples are running away?

2. From the context of page 234, what "apocalypse" is the allusion to the Four Horsemen referring to?

3. On the night when he realizes that their relationship is over, what does the narrator realize he really wants from Gin?

4. What mood do the diction and details included in the scene where the police leave their cars and enter the water create?

5. When the narrator unbuttons the second button on Gin's shirt, what does he see?

Short Essay Questions

1. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?

2. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?

3. What is the rhetorical effect of the diction used in the following description of the setting at Oak Street Beach: "The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed" (234)?

4. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?

5. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?

6. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?

7. On page 233, the narrator describes the girlfriend's mother's car as having "a rosary twined [around] the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs." Describe the tone of this image and explain how it is related to the narrator's later description of unbuttoning his girlfriend's shirt.

8. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?

9. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?

10. On the night in the lover's lane toward the end of the story, what does the narrator realize about his relationship with Gin?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the role of free will in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your assertions with textual evidence.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay in which you analyze the strategies that Dybek uses to build the tension that conveys the narrator's sexual desire. Comment on how the use of these strategies to build tension changes after the discovery of the body on the beach, and why. Use textual evidence to support your claims.

Essay Topic 3

Dybek borrowed from a famous passage of writing referred to as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy," which is available online. Research background information on this passage and then read its text. Write an essay in which you demonstrate how and where Dybek's writing in "We Didn't" has been influenced by Molly Bloom's Soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses. Then, based on your background research, make and defend a claim about the appropriateness of this borrowing. Be sure to support your claims with quoted evidence from the text of both "We Didn't" and Ulysses, and cite your sources in MLA format.

(see the answer keys)

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